Category: LRNT 524

Musings on Innovation

I’ve spent the last three days reading and re-reading Dron’s (2014) chapter in Online Distance Education, thinking about innovation, technology and education. It’s so tremendously rich with ideas I’d not known about previously, or had only thought about in different contexts than education technology.

Some of what keeps me going back to this chapter is the myriad of ways that we, within Western culture, use the word innovation, and the multiplicity of ways that it is used in this chapter. Merriam Webster (n.d.) defines innovation as:

  1. the introduction of something new
  2.  a new idea, method or device

While I’ve certainly used innovation in this way, it would seem that in our cultural context it means more – there’s an implication to the word that suggests technology, and useful technology.

Innovation is something we talk about regularly in my household, as my partner is a prototyper and inventor.  Our conversations about innovation and innovating often center around the use of ideas or objects, their ability to simplify and make life better in one way or another.

The Dron (2014) chapter discusses the adoption of new technologies (innovations) through several models. I investigated each of them, from Roger’s innovation diffusion theory (Rogers, 1995 as cited in Dron, 2014, p. 243) to UTAUT (Venkatesh, Morrris, Davis, & Davis, 2003, as cited in Dron, 2014, p.244) and had several conversations with my partner as we looked at what fit with our own experiences and observations. Ultimately, looking to understand educators in particular, I found  this metaphor (the image is hyperlinked to the original page):

Image of a pencil in which the parts are made analogous to educators adoption of ed tech. The hangers on don't do anything, the erasers undo what is done by the leaders, the leaders take on initial adoption and enthusiastically share their learning, the sharp ones grab the best of what the early adopters have done, the wood represents people who would use the technology if someone managed it all for them and the ferrules are the people who hand on too tightly to what they already know and do not change unless well convinced.

 

 

The pencil metaphor echoes most closely my experience of working with school populations (from K to post-secondary) as to how educators respond to new introductions of technology in the pedagogical or andragogical space.

The ferrules being the corrolary to Roger’s laggards, the leaders parallel to Roger’s innovators. The piece that this (rather un-academic) model has that is missing from the other ones is the erasers and hangers-on, who, in my experience, are as big a barrier to adoption of new technology as the ferrules. They are the architects of or the believers in the hard system, the non-responsive context. It is no wonder that, as Dron points out, adoption of new technologies and change happens most expeditiously in contexts that are tolerant of and promote diversity (Seely Brown & Duguid, 2000, as cited in Dron, 2014), as change happens in places that can entertain a variety of viewpoints.

I’d love to wrap this post up into a tidy bow, but that’s not possible yet. I want to pause with this rich chapter – to not feel rushed to have a final understanding of the richness that is in it. I’ll continue exploring other pieces, as well as digging deeper into some of the technologies that Dron (2014) discusses – some that are already defunct, and others that look promising for possible classroom work.

 

References:

Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America’s most-trusted online dictionary. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/
Dron, J. (2014). Chapter 9: Innovation and Change: Changing how we Change. In Zawacki-Richter, O. & T. Anderson (Eds.), Online distance education: Towards a research agenda. Athabasca, AB: AU Press.
The Pencil Metaphor: How Teachers Respond To Education Technology. (2014, August 28). Retrieved December 17, 2019, from TeachThought website: https://www.teachthought.com/technology/pencil-metaphor-how-teachers-respond-to-education-technology/

Understanding and Preventing Stress

Blog post created by Lisa Gates and Caroline Monsell

In Activity Two we participated in the Stanford d.School design process (2016) in partners.This experience led us to the development of a prototype for a blended online course consisting of three modules, one of which we developed into a set of lessons. Our partnership, consisting of Caroline Monsell and Lisa Gates, worked through each of the steps, learning about the individual parts of the process and each other’s student groups. 

The first steps of the design process asked us to focus on the problem, which took learning about each other’s student population and their needs through the process of empathetic design (Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, & Koskinen, 2014). Caroline works in an Ontario municipality with a client group that spans working positions in a variety of locations, in disparate jobs (everything from public works workers to highly educated engineering staff). Her student base brought challenges in terms of use of technology; within that group are confident users and virtually non-users. Lisa’s students are all in Human Services Programs at a BC Community College. The courses that these students participate in are blended delivery or online delivery. Students come to college with different backgrounds, including students for whom English is an additional language. These students all have at least an emergent level of computer use.

Through the exercise, strong commonalities were discovered which led to the development of three separate problem statements in Step 4 (d.School, 2016):

    1.   Students are new to technology and sharing information with others for the purpose of learning or self benefit.
    2. Students are feeling overwhelmed by workload and in need of both stress management and time management skills and strategies to feel positive about their workplace, ensure attendance and take fewer sick days.
    3. Students are in need of strong interpersonal skills and conflict resolution for the purpose of collaboration and workplace competency.

We saw that each of the three problem statements could be its own module in a course, and settled on developing the second problem statement into a module to help our student groups to cope with work stress and time management.  

Through Step 5, Ideate (d.School, 2016), we determined that students would need to understand time and stress management strategies before delving deeper into interpersonal communication skills. The lesson plan of the module is here: (Please click this link to view the CANVA). Activity sequencing in the module reflects the five design principles as discussed by Merrill (2002).  Utilizing Crichton & Carter’s (2017) suggestions, meaningful play and exploration through time mapping and self assessment strategies were built in, encouraging intellectual risk taking while working autonomously and in a team to find and solve problems related to work life balance.  

Through these activities, students were encouraged to take intellectual risks. Given the different student populations, our partnership added pieces to the earlier module to focus on peer-to-peer mentoring, fostering connection and the creation of a sense of safety so that students could take risks that create engagement . This reflects the early stages of Tuckman and Jensen’s model for group development, forming and norming (Tuckman & Jensen, 1977).

Our partnership is interested in learning ways that we can:

  • Ensure that our students are taking appropriate levels of intellectual risk and are engaged throughout the process.
  • Understand and apply other lenses/theories to the work we are developing so that we are sure to make the work relevant to the students.
  • Apply this course to understand and prevent burnout at work with other audiences, in other fields.

Our partnership is interested in your thoughts moving forward. We will respond to feedback until Tuesday, December 3, 2019. Thank you for your time. **edited** – We will respond to feedback until evening PST, Wednesday, December 4, 2019. Thank you!

References:

Crichton, S. & Carter, D. (2017). Taking Making into Classrooms Toolkit. Open School/ITA

Mattelmäki, T., Vaajakallio, K., & Koskinen, I. (2014). What Happened to Empathic Design? Design Issues, 30(1), 67–77. https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI

Merrill, M. D. (2002). First principles of instruction. Educational Technology Research and Development, 50(3), 43–59. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02505024

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of Small-Group Development Revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419–427. https://doi.org/10.1177/105960117700200404

Stanford University Institute of Design. (2016). A Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking — Stanford d.school [Website]. Retrieved from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking

I very much enjoyed reading Tony Bates draft chapter about Open Pedagogy as it is something I think about regularly in my work. His references to the need for a framework of maintenance and extension of existing Open Education Resources (OER) is something that comes up when looking at supporting people in the Human Services program I instruct in. My colleagues and I endeavour to keep textbook costs low and course materials widely accessible, and are familiar with the inherent challenges that this brings.

Bates (2019) discusses possible ideas for stewardship of OER in section 11.4.3 – which made me think about existing, working models, like those of the origins of the idea of ‘Open-source’ software. Though they didn’t start this way, today these are huge communities of people decentralized and distributed across the globe who contribute to the build, maintenance, development and learning commons around a single thing such as Moodle, GIMP, or Linux. People involved in these massive projects contribute their expertise in this distributed build framework, working singularly and in groups on debugging, building, tutorial creation and product support (among other things). While it may seem counter-intuitive to compare maintaining software with maintaining a set of OER, I believe that there are enough similarities to make the comparison relevant. 

Both Open Software and Open Pedagogy have evolved organically within the framework of the Internet, somewhat entwined as the philosophy of ‘Open’ (freely sharing resources in keeping with academic principles of freely sharing information) grew into the movement that it has become today. As Open Pedagogy becomes better understood and more people are reaching for free distribution and dissemination of knowledge, the time is coming to shape the building of Open Pedagogy and with that, looking at existing working models is valuable.

I think that small educational institutional settings (like the one I instruct in) have specific challenges when it comes to the development and use of Open resources. Individual subjects have smaller and smaller numbers of subject matter experts (SMEs) as the subject becomes more specialized, and many traditional SMEs don’t have computer skills or the types of Instructional Design (ID) skills needed to build and maintain a commons of information in any coherent, helpful or distributable way. 

Bates talks about consortiums, that “a consortium of teachers or institutions creating common learning materials within a broader program context, that can be shared both within and outside the consortium.” (Bates 2019, Section 11.4.5). I wonder about the ability of smaller institutions to survive and grow in this context. My own institution is small, with small class sizes – the idea of our 8 member Human Services Staff taking on the build and maintenance (even with strong student involvement) of an open knowledge repository and project/portfolio space is not realistic. Even if we were part of a larger, distributed network, this would be a challenge. Looking to central resources such as BCCampus to support us in builds of these kinds of projects is possible, but an additional time commitment for instructors who are already teaching very full course loads. 

I’m curious as to whether there are specific subjects for which it is easier to build and maintain OER that are relevant, useful and fully accessible without cost (there are always hidden costs in web hosting, domain names, and web maintenance)? What could be ways for small Colleges to partner with Universities to network in the creation of centralized Open resources for the benefit of our students and instructor edification? I’d love to hear from you as to what might work moving forward. Thank you in advance for your thoughts.

Reference:

Bates, A. W. (2019).Chapter 11.4 Open Pedagogy. In Teaching in a Digital World. 2nd ed. BC Campus.